Repetition and identity / Catherine Pickstock.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pickstock, Catherine, author.

Series:

Literary agenda

The literary agenda

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature--Philosophy.

Literature.

Literature, Modern--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Literature, Modern.

Repetition (Philosophy).

Physical Description:

xxi, 211 pages ; 22 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013.

Summary:

Repetition and Identity offers a theory of the existing thing. A thing only has identity and consistency when it has already been repeated, but repetition summons difference and the shadow invocation of a connecting sign. In contrast to Post-structuralism, Catherine Pickstock proposes that signs are not only part of reality, but may truthfully express the real. Non-identical repetition can hold beyond scepticism since it sustains analogy, rather than an equivocal rupture of the univocal. However, this recognition of an ineffable link between things via the sign depends upon a decision which is poetically performed. A wager is laid upon the possibility of a consistency which sustains also the subject, in continuity with the elusive consistency of nature. It is played out in terms of a debate with the self concerning the existential stances open to human beings, within the context of a wider inter-subjective search for an historical consistency of culture. But is the price of a subjective recognition of an obscure unity amongst things a religious renunciation of finite reality in favour of this hidden ground of unification? Or can there be a positive analogical oscillation between vertical abandonment and horizontal affiliation? Pickstock argues that the early Greek Church Fathers are at one with Søren Kierkegaard in offering us this strategy for the saving of the integrity of things. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Identifying Things 1

2 The Scale of Things 21

3 The Repeated Thing 41

4 The Repeated Sign 71

5 The Repeated Self 85

6 The Compelled Repetition 109

7 Eternal Repetition 127

8 Repetition and Rhetoric 151

9 Rupture and Return 171

10 The Repeated God 193.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0199683611

9780199683611

OCLC:

856188191